Stephen Colbert

These are trying times. Beset by towering gas prices, never-ending wars, and perplexing celebrity-name fusions, we had nowhere to turn for guidance...until one man stepped forward and administered a wedgie to our troubles. ''I would say laughter is the best medicine, but it's more than that,'' explains The Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert. ''Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche, then applies a topical antibiotic cream.''

Colbert, 42, put the pun in pundit as a conservative O'Reilly-esque squawker while turning the Comedy Central series into TV's most irreverent news talk show (it's even a notch above The Daily Show, Colbert's former home). On one episode, he urged a dime boycott because FDR was a ''tax-loving mental cripple''; on another, he got Representative Robert Wexler to finish the sentence ''I enjoy cocaine because...'' with ''...it's a fun thing to do.''

The result? Merriam-Webster declared the term truthiness — coined on the first Report last fall — its Word of the Year. The San Francisco Zoo named a baby eagle after him. He scored at the Emmys with his ''Good evening, godless sodomites'' shtick after losing to Barry Manilow. And his polarizing roast of President Bush at the White House Correspondents' Dinner became the stuff of YouTube legend. (''I did the style of jokes I'd been doing for six months,'' he says of the D.C. gig. ''I can't buy into it being a scandal or heroic.'') This faux blowhard's ''Colbert Nation'' even won him a Hungarian bridge-naming contest.

But fans needn't worry that he'll pull a Steve Carell and head for Hollywood. ''All I ask is for the world to understand that I'm going to expect more from them next year,'' he says. ''I'm a love junkie. Keep it coming.'' —Dan Snierson